SwedishAdvocate
Active Member
This sounds hopeful..../ Another critical component is they use a special type of bearing in all their modern trains and the entire country is completely dependent on rail. There are only three sources for those bearings, two are American and one Swedish. They don't know how to make them.
As the components that keep their economy running break, they won't have the parts to fix them and things will degrade. They will probably do things like go back to older bearing types for their trains, but the newer rail cars will go out of service as their bearing wear out and can't be replaced.
Some things they will have to do without and others will have to have work arounds devised.
Galeev points out they are putting all the emphasis on keeping military production going. The parts of the country with civilian production are crashing economically due to lack of parts. The military production areas are doing okish due to the emphasis on military, but those plants are struggling to get parts too.
They don't have the engineering and scientific expertise they had 40 years ago when they were trying to compete with the west on a shoestring. They are also reluctant to hire in Chinese expertise and most of their tech is geared to use western parts.
Basically all the tech in Russia is a ticking time bomb.
But two questions popped up:
1. How does North Korea keep their country going? And not only that. How did they develop nuclear weapons and ICBMs?
2. Iran is apparently only weeks away from getting their own nuclear weapon. How did that happen? Is it 'that easy' to build nuclear weapons?